VISIONS DE L’AMOUR DE SOI
or, Visions of Self-Love
-for Luba Morsch
on my 21st birthday
for the first time
I became aware my Mama really knew me
it might seem odd but,
to a sensitive soul like me,
advice is indistinguishable from complaint
and I don’t know a single writer who loves the critics
but I held a new notebook in my hands
already the perfect gift for any writer, even the ones who type,
not just the notebooks but the idea of the notebooks
their empty pages patiently awaiting our curiosity
curiosity, not skill, because the best notebooks
don’t like to house any self-serious dribble
this notebook, bound in clean cream cloth,
rivets holding pages and ribbon lace,
with a stylized heart like a watermark at the top of every page
the cover emblazoned with a dress form, a corset
framed perhaps in a mirror donned with heady pink roses
scrawled in the top-right, “Visions D’Amour,”
Kodak captured a perfect freeze-frame of my heart
for a decade I brought it everywhere
painstakingly labelled each page by hand
with a Table of Contents too, although admittedly
if I’d gotten married one of these times
it would have likely been the signature book
and what a mistake that would have been
instead now it’s loved, frayed
falling away without glue, and sparsely filled
but on the very last page,
the jacket page, beyond the last page
but not inside the back cover,
a stranger from my twenties with my handwriting has scrawled:
you have seen now that it is not what you hold onto
that defines your being
only what you give
and how much
and what
and to whom
this and only
this is who you are
so now you see? beauty beckons to our best nature
the work blooms and grows to its own rhythm
what we learn this way cannot be forgotten
